Browsed byMonth: May 2017

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.12. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. Please subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes or your favorite app, and remember that this podcast is “in-network” for most insurance plans.

In this week’s podcast, we take on the state of American health care, discussing at length the recently passed Republican zombie bill, the American Health Care Act, as well as Elizabeth Rosenthal’s book, An American Sickness, which discusses health care’s broken cost structure.

We discuss some of the paths forward for health care reform, and then close with a rare foray into current events, as the Trump administration’s recklessness manages to flabbergast even us.

We’ll return in two weeks with This is Fine 1.13, discussing mass incarceration.

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.11: The New, New Marshall Plan. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. Please subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes or your favorite app, and use a printout of this link as your token the next time you play Monopoly!

In this week’s podcast, guest Marshall Steinbaum, a senior economist and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, joins us to discuss how there is no free market to be found in the state of nature and how the United States has always had an active industrial policy, often favoring the wealthy.

We discuss why the movement to defund and privatize public goods like education coincided with the civil rights’ movement attempt to extend those goods to non-whites. Finally, we touch on the ways in which corporate and shareholder power, and the decline of progressive taxation have made the economy more favorable to capital and more hostile for labor.